Shooter's Hill is pictured excellently well in _A Tale of Two Cities_; the time, "a Friday night, late in November, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five," the occasion the passing of the Dover Mail. The coachman was "laying on" to the horses like another Macduff, and the near leader of the tired team was shaking its head and everything upon it, as though denying that the coach could be got up the hill at all; while the passengers, having been turned out to walk up the road and ease the horses, splashed miserably in the slush. The time was "ten minutes, good, past eleven," and the coachman had but just finished addressing the horses in such strange exclamations as "Tst! Yah! Get on with you! My blood!" and other picturesque, not to say lurid, phrases, when sounds were heard along the highway. Sounds of any sort on the road could not at this hour be aught than ominous, and so the passengers, who were just upon the point of re-entering the coach, shivered and wondered if their purses and watches were quite safe which were lying snugly _perdu_ in their boots. "Tst! Joe!" calls the coachman, from his box, warningly to the guard. "What do you say, Tom?" "I say a horse at a canter coming up," replies Tom. "I say a horse at a gallop, Tom," rejoins the guard, entrenching himself behind his seat, and cocking his blunderbuss, calling out to the passengers at the same time, "Gentlemen, in the King's name, all of you!" The mail stopped. The hearts of the passengers within thumped audibly, and if one could not see how they blenched, it was only owing to the obscurity of the mildewy inside of the old Mail. There they sat, in anxious expectancy, amid the disagreeable smell arising from the damp and dirty straw, and the relief they experienced when it was not a highwayman who rode up to them, but only a messenger for Mr. Jarvis Lorry, who sat shivering among the rest, may (in the words of a certain class of novelists) "be better imagined than described." There is but one criticism I have to make of this; but it is a serious point. There was no Dover Mail coach in 1775, for the earliest of all mail coaches, that between Bristol and London, was not established before 1784. The mails until then were carried by post-boys on horse-back. Of Severndroog Castle, built on the crest of Shooter's Hill during the last century, I shall say nothing, because, for one thing, it is of little interest, and, for another, whatever has to be said about it belongs to the province of the Guide Books, upon whose territory I do not propose to infringe. I want to give a modicum of information with the maximum of amusement, with which declaration of policy I will proceed along the road to Dover.